Pure Demo Impressions

Pure is the latest game from Black Rock Studios(The Studio who brought us the ATV Off road series) and it plans to continue the tradition of off road racing with tricks as a main focus.

Story

None, obviouslyGameplay

Pure is all about trick racing, aside the the obvious “Get to the finish line first” objective the game sports a trick system. Tricks are pretty much your lifeline in Pure and if you don’t do them you are pretty much guaranteed to lose. Tricks are preformed after jumps and before the jump you have to press down on the analog stick before a jump then push it forward after it in order to preload. After pre loading you push the analog stick in a any direction while pressing x to pull a trick. When a trick is pulled off you will increase your thrill bar. As the bar increases you will gain access to more advanced tricks that require the circle button and then triangle button. The more advanced tricks will refill the thrill bar faster than the default tricks do but also take bigger jumps in order to pull off. The thrill bar is also needed to boost. So the game becomes a balancing act of whether you want to pull off extreme tricks or just have enough for boosting.The controls for the ATVs are tight and responsive however I do wish that the analog stick wasn’t needed for tricks because you will find yourself pressing X and forgetting the analog stick so your just flying through midair.

The Demo sports a tutorial that has you racing around a small track with the game giving you objectives to pull off with real time instructions. What i mean by this is that it won’t pause the game(Except for once or twice) to tell you what to do which makes the tutorial easier to go through.Graphics/Audio

The game looks pretty good but it does not measure up to Motorstorm: Pacific Rift, but then it doesn’t have to, its a great looking game on its own merits. The soundtrack is excellently well done from what I’ve heard in my handful of races

Conclusion

Pure is a very solid off road racing game. It is not really my cup of tea as i don’t really prefer racing games and then I prefer more straight arcade ones without tricks such as the Ridge Racer series. That said I can easily recommend giving this game a shot if your into racing games or at the very least curious about them.